Thursday, March 28, 2019

April 14, 2019 - Palm Sunday

Biblical
Words
[599]

Psalm
118:1-2, 19-29; Luke
19:28-40.

The ancient royal city is
visited by a Prince of Peace it will not accept.

Note:The
Revised Common Lectionary has two sets of readings for this Sunday, the
“Liturgy of the Palms” and the “Liturgy of the Passion.”My practice is to treat these separately,
doing the “Palms” on this Sunday, and saving the “Passion” until Good Friday,
when the entire Passion Narrative in Luke will be listened to.

Psalm
118:1-2, 19-29.

The Liturgy of the Palms has only
two readings, a Psalm and a Gospel, the two virtually mirror images of each
other.

The Psalm reading is a portion of
the long Psalm 118.This entire psalm contains a sequence of
liturgical actions that in reality forms a profound background to Jesus’ entry
into Jerusalem.The central figure of the action – the king whose fate determines the destiny of the realm and its people – emerges
from a desperate struggle with evil forces to ascend now to the holy temple of
the great God who has made his victory possible.

The selected verses of our reading
focus on the Coming One who seeks
entry into the temple.

O give thanks to the Lord, for he
is good;

his steadfast love endures forever!

Let Israel
say,

“His steadfast love endures forever.”

Open to me the
gates of righteousness,

that I may enter through them

and give thanks to the Lord.(Verses 1-2, 19, NRSV.)

There is a summons to praise the
Lord – and someone calls out, “Let me in, so I can do that!”

Who is this speaker?

Earlier he has said, “Out of my
distress I called on the Lord; / the Lord answered me and set me in a broad
place” (verse 5).

The speaker is one who has already
been saved and has come to the temple to give thanks for that
deliverance.He was besieged by “all
nations,” fought them off, and survived by the Lord’s help (verses 10-13, not
in our reading).His escape was hailed
in “the tents of the righteous” as a great victory, and he comes to the temple
because, “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord”
(verse 17).

The Christian use of only verses
19-29 for Palm Sunday has in fact reversed
the liturgical structure of the old Israelite cult drama.In the old ritual, the triumphal entry into
the city and temple was the climax after all
the struggle, a struggle that indeed took the speaker to the threshold of death
(verses 13 and 17).In the Christian
drama, however, Jesus makes a triumphal entry into the temple before the great struggle with the
powers of death – to which, indeed, he succumbs, is killed, and can attain
victory only by recovering from death.

Thus Palm Sunday is always ironic.It appears to be something that it turns out not to be.The declaration about the great reversal –
“The stone that the builders rejected / has become the chief cornerstone”
(verse 22) – means that the “apparent” victory of the moment is really a token
of a more ultimate victory on the other side of the struggle with death.

When the speaker
has actually entered the temple, the people cry out, “Save us, we beseech you,
O Lord!”(Verse 25.This “save us” is the hosh‘iah na’in Hebrew that becomes the “Hosanna” of the
Gospels.)With this cry the hopeful
people receive the victorious royal figure:“Blessed in the name of the Lord is the one who comes!”(Verse 26.The NRSV margin is correct for the Hebrew; the quotations in the Gospels
change the order of the phrases.)The
people process to the altar, waving “branches” to celebrate the salvation
signified by the arrival of this Coming One.

The coda: standing in the center of the temple court,
and presumably facing the holy of holies inside the temple building, the royal
speaker declares, “You are my God, I will extol you.”And the liturgy ends with a final summons to
all to give thanks for God’s steadfast love.

The Eastern
Gate of the city as seen from the Kidron
Valley, with the Mount of
Olives behind the viewer.This is approximately where Palm Sunday
occurred.

The present structure was built by Suleiman
the Magnificent in the early 16th century CE.The gate was sealed shut as ordered by the Lord in Ezekiel 44:2.

(Photo by Jay Wilcoxen.)

Luke 19:28-40.

When the
Gospel According to Luke is read only in its own terms (without harmonizing it
with the other Gospels), it becomes evident that Luke does not in fact
have a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem.What he has instead is a parade on the Mount
of Olives, across the deep valley from the city walls of Jerusalem
(as in verses 35-40).

After the
parade is over, Jesus has still not reached the city:“As he came near and saw the city, he wept
over it.” At that point, Luke gives
Jesus’ long lament over the coming destruction of the unfaithful city (Luke 19:41-44).

Only then
does Jesus finally enter the temple – and immediately drive out the merchants (without
thinking it over for a day, as Mark has it, Mark 11:11,
15-17).(Hans Conzelmann points out that
in Luke Jesus actually “occupies” the temple for several days, though he
ignores the rest of the city until its time to do the Passover, The Theology of St. Luke, pp.
75-76.)

(For more on
the city in Luke-Acts, see below the Special
Note on Jerusalem in Luke-Acts.)

Back to
the beginning of our reading.

As in Mark,
Luke gives special attention to securing
the animal on which Jesus will ride in the parade (verses 29-34).The action is located on the east side of the
Mount of Olives, where Jesus stayed while in the Jerusalem
area.There is a clandestine air about
the instructions to the disciples on how to find and justify themselves in
getting this animal.“The Lord needs
it,” is all one needs to say!

In any case,
riding this animal is a highly symbolic act.We learn the power of the symbolism from Zechariah
9:9.

Rejoice
greatly, O daughter Zion…

Lo, your king
comes to you;

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and
riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.(NRSV)

And the prophecy
goes on to identify this royal figure as the Prince of Peace:

He will cut off the
chariot from Ephraim

and the war-horse from Jerusalem;

and the battle bow
shall be cut off,

and he shall command peace to the nations;

his dominion shall
be from sea to sea,

and from the River to the ends of the
earth.(Zechariah 9:10)

What the
enthusiastic disciples declare about Jesus comes from Psalm 118, though in
their version it comes out this way:

Blessed is the king

who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven,

and glory in the highest heaven!(Verse 38.)

The disciples
make such a clamor that good law-abiding Pharisees urge Jesus to quiet them
down.At this moment, however, they
can’t be quiet, says Jesus, or else the stones themselves would cry out.This is the high celebrative moment which
must be allowed its full expression!

Unlike the
great psalm, however, this is not the last note.In Jesus’ drama, the cost of the intense
battle for salvation is yet to come.

Special Note on Jerusalem in
Luke-Acts

The Issue.Jerusalem
has a radically different meaning in Luke-Acts than it does in Mark and
Matthew.There were clearly different
takes on Jerusalem by different
circles of Christians in the second generation after Jesus’ death.(John, probably the latest Gospel, agrees
with Luke on this issue.)

In Mark and
Matthew, Jerusalem is the
city of death.Jesus goes there by
divine direction to confront the powers of the establishment and die in God’s
cause.His followers return to Galilee
for the revelation of the risen Lord and their mission to the nations.(See Mark 14:28; 16:7; Matthew 26:32;
28:7,16-20.)There is no place in Mark
and Matthew for a return to Jerusalem
after the resurrection or for a leadership role for Jesus’ family. Nothing in
those Gospels prepares for a Jerusalemchurch of Jesus
followers – especially one led by James the brother of Jesus.

By contrast,
in Luke (and Acts), the disciples are never to return to Galilee.By direct and precise instructions from
Jesus, they are told to stay in Jerusalem
and begin their conquest of the world from there.The risen Jesus says, “I am sending upon you
what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed
with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).“While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem,
but to wait there for the promise of the Father.... ‘But you will receive power
when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth’” (Acts 1:4 and 8).

Luke’s relation to Jerusalem.Acts
makes clear that in his early years Luke had been to Jerusalem,
precisely in the years when James the Brother was the head of the church there
(the “we” passage in Acts 21:15-19).That was around the year 57, maybe twenty-seven years after Jesus’
death.For two more years (57-59 CE)
Paul was in Roman custody in Caesarea, the Hellenized
coastal city where the Roman governor resided.Luke was still with Paul at the end of that two years (Acts 27:1), so
presumably he had learned much in that time about the Jesus groups in both Jerusalem
and the coastal cities of Palestine.

On the other
hand, Luke seems to know Galilee and its Jesus movements
only from Mark’s Gospel, and the Galilee followers are
never mentioned in Acts.(Acts 9:31 is simply an exception that proves the
rule:Galilee is
mentioned but nothing is said about it.)

Paul himself
seems to have viewed the Jerusalem
church as a primary authority for the early Jesus tradition, though making
clear that his own revelation was independent of it (Galatians 1:13-24).This may be the source of Luke’s sustained and consistent Jerusalem
orientation for the beginning of the Jesus movement in both the Gospel and
Acts.

Jerusalem in the Gospel.Jerusalem
is clearly of great symbolic importance in the Gospel.Besides being the city of the Messiah’s
death, it is the goal of his mission through much of the earlier work.

The whole
middle block of traditions gathered in the “travel narrative” (9:51-19:44) is presented as a journey to Jerusalem.That block begins with a very solemn
declaration by the narrator:“When the
days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem”
(9:51).“Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must
be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem”
(13:33).

Jerusalem
had long been the object of a great eschatological future.Anyone who had seriously pondered the scroll of Isaiah from beginning to
end would recognize that the great temple-city was to become a spectacular
sanctuary and oracle for nations far and wide.The prophet indicted the faithful city that had become a whore but knew
that she was scheduled to be restored to justice and faithfulness (1:21-26).That restoration would make Zion
a beacon to the nations where divine instruction and justice could be found
that would produce international peace (2:2-4).

This scenario
of the future restoration of the world-centered sanctuary city is carried
throughout Isaiah, particularly in Isaiah 40:1-11; 49:8-23; 54; 60; and
62.In several of these passages, the
Anointed One is the agent or companion of the restored mother city (49:1-8;
61).And, these visions in Isaiah emphasized
that the scattered people of Israel
would come back to Zion as the main
highlight of that great restoration.

That Luke
understood Jesus in terms of the prophesies of Isaiah is clear from such
pivotal quotations from that scroll as Luke 3:4-6; 4:18-19; 8:10; 19:45; and 22:37.Luke understood the importance of Jesus going
to Jerusalem in Isaiah’s terms –
with one vast caveat.When Jesus
reached Jerusalem, he
was rejected.

In Luke’s
rather mature view of those events, not only was the prophetic Jesus rejected
by Jerusalem, the risen Jesus was
also rejected – as related at length in Acts.Thus, the prophetic Jesus had foreseen that Jerusalem
had in reality been doomed all along.While still on his way there, Jesus laments over Jerusalem as already
abandoned (13:34-35), and just as he stands on the threshold of the city, he delivers
an even more devastating lament over its coming destruction by enemy armies,
“because you did not recognize the time of your visitation” (19:41-44).

By the time
Luke was composing his two-volume work, Jerusalem
had long been destroyed in the war of 66-73 CE.No Jerusalem church
descended from the family of Jesus was any longer at the head of the
movement.Some radical re-thinking was
required of the Jesus followers – now beginning to be called Christians.What was to be the relation of the rapidly
growing Jesus movement to the sacred heritage of Israel
and its scriptures?

Some
Christian groups would reject the whole Israelite heritage (Marcion, around 140
CE), but the main line of non-Judean churches would insist that that heritage
was carried on, by the authority of the Holy Spirit, in the life of the new
communities that had spread throughout the Roman provinces, even to Rome
itself.

By then, the only Jerusalem that mattered was a heavenly one – which Luke left
for John to describe in the book of Revelation.

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About Me

I taught Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School for 20 years, then spent 14 years in hospital management. In semi-retirement I was Chief Financial Officer for Protestants for the Common Good for 13 years, and began to write Lectionary Studies there. In 2011, I wrote a series of reviews of Study Bibles available at that time, which are now going up slowly on the JW Study Bibles blog. I have enjoyed Biblical study and Biblical scholarship off and on for about sixty-five years.